Any suggestion how financial bonuses for developers should be calculated. It seems to be easy -- take things like: effectiveness/performance, code quality/bugs count, experience, teamwork, engagement, Over hours, some others. and count some score. But we all know (i.e. http://gojko.net/2008/08/07/paying-programmers-are-bonuses-bad-a...
Should senior developers be exempt from unit testing - or should they be allowed to use lackeys to implement them? What's the best way to motivate people who are not used to using unit testing techniques to adopt them? ...
After several extremely productive days this week; this morning I fired up my IDE’s and opened up the code-lines I am currently working with. I cracked my knuckles and then …… nothing. I am actually really excited about my projects and their progress too. Whether you call it “programmer’s block” or “lack of inspiration”, we all hit a wal...
Recently, a member of our team got burned out and had to leave. Basically, he got into a death march situation on an overdue project, started by working late to catch up which grew into stranger and stranger hours. Eventually, he was leaving when everyone else was arriving and starting work in the evenings. Consequently, he developed s...
You always have 10% of the people that are rock stars, 10% of the people that are deadbeats. How do you turn more of the 80% in the middle into rockstars? ...
When working on a project, after the interesting parts are coded, my motivation is severely diminished. What do you do to get over this problem? ...
My company is allowing some local high school students to come on-site and job shadow for an hour or two. What are some ways that I can inspire these young people into potentially taking a career in software development? Any advice would be great. Thanks! ...
I've recently started in a new team of classic ASP developers and part of my role is to re-train the team in ASP.NET 3.5 and C#. To kick things off I've been running weekly training sessions on the fundamentals (as well as some sexier sessions on Linq & Ajax) and these have proven quite popular. However, despite a little dabbling, ther...
This is something which effects all workplaces alike, but I would like to have input from a technical community. How do you deal with apathy? What techniques have worked best for you, and how best can you keep your interest in the long term? All input is appreciated. ...
I've been teaching for a couple of years now a course for high school students (not always computing-oriented schools) using some gaming framework. This has been very useful for trying to get them to pursue a career in the field (which is one of the goals), showing them that programming is not only making bussiness, boring applications....
Coding is a very attention consuming exercise, how do you prepare yourself to begin a good coding session? I use to be more calm and ready to think in a useful way after reading some insightful new posts from my rss reader. ...
I have great motivation at the start of a project, but if I get to a dull task, or if the project drags on too long, I really struggle to get going. I'm terribly lazy at the best of times, so this question really goes out to anyone who is of a similar personality: How do you motivate yourself to get on with a dull coding task? ...
We've been going at it for several months and we stopped implementing new features so we can enter the alpha program. Now, it is all about bug fixing until we reach a reasonable level at which point we will let a few customers test the application and of course, finally release to all our customers. How do you keep the motivation high d...
We're in the middle of a fairly large-scale bespoke project for a Client. With almost a year gone, and another year at ahead before the final phase is pegged for delivery... well its a little difficult to stay motivated all the time. I try to alleviate it a couple of ways. Pet Projects & nixers Reading & Education & keeping up to spe...
Hi All, I've been working as an engineer professionally for 15 years for a number of different companies. My question is how do you stay motivated at work? I can generally be easily motivated if I'm working on design, but that seems to be about 5% of my actual work hours. Most of my work seems to end up being fixing problems in existi...
Doctor says: My job is meaningful because I save lives. Programmer says: My job is meaningful because I... umm... write DB queries?! Are you proud of being a programmer? Do you think that your work has positive effect on people's well being? Or you just happen to do programming because you have bills to pay... Note: Similar to this qu...
How do you manage not being able to do what you what to do or feel is the right approach to something? Have you ever been in a situation where you are told to "follow the spec" even though there is a blatant issue (design, UI, performance, etc.) with it? Have you ever looked at a problem and recommended a technology that would solve it ...
I've been programming for 8 years now (since I was 15), and working with internet for 7 of those. I remember when I first learned how excited I was when I was taking my firs Pascal lessons... I thought in code, and was always experimenting, even with my limited knowledge. When I got my first job (the same company I'm still working today)...
Hi, I'm a team lead/dev who manages a team of 10 programmers. Most of them are hard working talented guys. But of late, I've got this one person who while highly talented and has delivered great work for me in the past, has just become completely unreliable. It's not his ability - that is not in question - he's proven that many times....
I would like my programming team to be more productive and it has been suggested that the way to achieve this is to provide incentives to make them work harder and / or longer. Does anyone else work in an environment where bonuses are offered for completed work? And if so, does it help? It's been suggested that an Xbox or Wii could be...